For his latest film, director Jirí Menzel has adapted a novel by Bohumil Hrabal. Another Hrabal novel, "Closely Watched Trains," was adapted by Menzel and won the 1968 best foreign-language Oscar.

Menzel has an eye for capturing the Czech novelist's quirky humanistic stories. Although narration can be annoying, it's ideal in "I Served the King of England" because the words - often comic and filled with double entendres that aren't lost in translation - are inimitably Hrabal's.

The narrator is attempting to make sense of his life as he nears the end of it. Most of the film is in flashbacks as Jan Dite (played as an old man by Oldrich Kaiser and a young one by the astonishing Ivan Barnev) recalls living in a chaotic time for both him and the then-Czechoslovakia.

All Jan ever wants is to be wealthy and surrounded by fabulous-looking women - an early-model Donald Trump. And he comes tantalizingly close until a series of bad decisions - such as falling in love with a German woman, Liza (Julia Jentsch), toward the end of World War II - do him in.

The movie immediately establishes Jan's character in a vivid sequence shot in black and white with the jittery background music of a silent film. Jan, beginning his long climb up, sells frankfurters at a railroad station. The train takes off before he can give a customer his change. Jan runs to catch up, but you can see he's not running very fast. With a greedy look, he counts the bills that are now his.

Menzel visualizes Jan's seesaw existence vividly. This is not the guerrilla filmmaking typical of Eastern European cinema, but a lushly photographed eye-opener with scrumptious scenes of a four-star restaurant where Jan goes to work next. There's a breathtaking shot of him tending bar. Glittery rich people are reflected in a mirror behind him, looking in all their finery like subjects in a Max Beckmann painting.

The movie takes its title from the restaurant's skillful maitre d', of whom Jan is in awe. When he asks how he always knows the right thing to do, the reply is: "I served the king of England."

Barnev is a physical actor able to convey Jan's ambition in his difficulty standing still. He wants to get on with it to get closer to his dreams. When he cozies up to some Germans occupying Czechoslovakia, it's strictly for what they can do for him, with no sense of the politics of his new friendships.

When Liza volunteers to be a nurse on the Polish front, he winds up living in one of the Lebensborn breeding resorts, where women are cloistered while waiting to give birth to 100 percent Aryan babies. The little touches are what make this movie, such as Jan making love under a portrait of Hitler and being told to move his head so as not to block the Fuhrer.

Upon Liza's sudden death, he inherits a Jewish family's rare stamp collection (acquired illegally on the front) and becomes what he had always dreamed of: a millionaire. But there are more downs than ups to Jan's life, and it isn't long before the consequences of his choices catch up with him.

A lot of history whizzes by, and the script doesn't always make it clear exactly what's happening. You begin to wait for the narration by the elder Jan to explain. Meanwhile you are swept away by the beauty of individual moments and by Barnev's extraordinary performance, which beautifully serves "I Served the King of England."

-- Advisory: Sexual content and nudity.

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